I'm glad that you responded but I'm trying to avoid "preaching to the choir". Look I don't want to seriously insult ANYBODY but this open STEM positions number is more manipulated than the government-approved unemployment rate the night before a major election, it would be helpful if there were a few less ostriches hiding their heads in the sand here but that's probably asking too much. Nobody would be happier than I would if the politics and the visa wars would just go away, but the economy is terribly weak and everyone is limiting the salaries for new hires as if they had just been told the plans for their primary product had just been hacked and given to senior management at a factory in western (low-cost) China (and in a few cases it probably has). I've been around long enough to remember the old days when there was a "tech track" but nowadays it's assumed anyone who hasn't gone into management by the age of 35 "just couldn't cut it", that's why most outfits have an active (but secret) policy that assures no one inside the company can ever get to see the resume of any candidate over the age of 50 (at a time when most people will have to work until they're 70 or later). It never used to be a problem finding an "honest audience" to talk about career issues but I guess "fiction" (this blog) "follows reality" (today's hyperpartisan politics). Nice to have your presence but I'm afraid the two of us doesn't constitute a quorum!

I don't follow you JeffL_2. Are you insinuating that this study is bogus and that the people that prepared the study were paid off? What evidence do you have to suggest that? And what purpose would it serve these top 100 companies to create the perception that there are a lot of unfilled jobs? Scratching my head over that one.

Wadhwa has been a shill for more visas forever since he fronts for Indian outsourcing companies. If what he says were true then the US would be falling behind the rest of the industrial world. As far as I can see there is no evidence of that and in medical device technology I doubt there is any country close to us in as many different areas.

When I worked in engineering, my company had probably about 50% of its engineers on H1B visas. They paid considerably lower than other engineering companies across the board.

The H-1Bs companies are supposed to use the concept of "prevailing wage" What is the prevailing wage? At best it is the rear view mirror average of the wages in an area. It is not the current or future wage. When I looked for a new job the company had to offer more than what I was making not what they previously paid everybody else. I asked for about 10% more and we settled on about half. The prevailing wage is just past history even if it is up to date (which I doubt). So it is easy for companies to keep their H-1Bs at a lower wage scale using the prevailing wage.

The infrastructure was built during the Cold War and preceeds much of the electronics indistry. In addition, much of it kept the US semiconductor industry afloat when it was about to go under due to dumping by Japan and South Korea. How many people remember that Intel almost went bankrupt until IBM chose the 8088 for the PC, aquired 25% of the company and forced a second source contract with AMD on them.

I was there in the defense industry when massive amounts of government money were pumped into radiation hardening research and the very high speed integrated circuit program by DARPA. I image a lot of that money went to Intel and other US semiconductor manufacturers. It is a partnership not a one way street.

MClayton0 wrote "Technical companies will not hire the "STEM" students in lower half of their class it seems, thus the 50 percent number?"

I wonder what the GPA distribution is for STEM graduates across the U.S. Whether or not this 50% statistic is valid (50% not getting STEM jobs), I think your point is valid and I suspect there is a strong correlation between GPA and probability of STEM employment for a new graduate. In a tight job market, how many companies will hire a new engineering grad who was a B & C student, when there are so many new engineering grads who were A & B students? Even worse, for those who end up taking a job in another field, the more time that passes since college graduation, the less likely it is that they will ever work in a STEM field, despite having a STEM degree.

So to hear you folks talk I could go online tomorrow and create a website called "The American Foundation for Employment Statistics" and go to the top 100 technical companies, stick my hand out and say "I'll put numbers on this website that reflect any conclusion about employment that YOU want my viewers to have if you grease my palm with enough cash" then I turn around and put up something like "according to my official figures there's 3 million STEM jobs going unfilled", then I get to laugh all the way to the bank AND YOU LOSERS WOULD BUY IT!? (It's actually WORSE than that because we're mostly talking about outfits that already have the website, they're really just "talking their book".)

I think we've found a major source of the problem here - it's manifested in a lack of critical thinking skills...

You got it. When I worked in engineering, my company had probably about 50% of its engineers on H1B visas. They paid considerably lower than other engineering companies across the board. There were also a lot of PhDs in management positions, and therefore a lot of PhDs hired for engineering positions, which I think drove everyone else's pay down even further.